Fine Dining: Playing with food at Cafe Sardine

Lesley Chesterman, Gazette fine dining critic07.23.2012

Aaron Langille, one of Café Sardine’s three chefs, previously worked in Montreal at Le Club Chasse et Pêche and Le Filet. He has also had an internship at Noma in Copenhagen, the mecca of nouvelle-Scandinavian cuisine. Langille’s plates will transport your taste buds to new horizons.John Kenney
/ The Gazette

The squash flan is velvety and sweet. Marjoram and pickled shallot help create flavour fireworks in this dish.John Kenney
/ The Gazette

A rich veal bone marrow is served in a peppery watercress salad, topped with a slow-cooked duck egg.John Kenney
/ The Gazette

Delicate trout is set on caramelized fingerling potatoes with a tiny bit of super salty fish roe poised on top.John Kenney
/ The Gazette

MONTREAL - There's a certain slickness to the restaurant experience that can sometimes be a real turnoff, a sort of Cheesecake Factory-feel of dishes churned out from a kitchen where faceless cooks toil and chirpy waiters rule. And you don’t just get that in family-style or chain restaurants. Frankly, I’ve had impersonal dining experiences in as many high-end restaurants as I’ve had at Bâton Rouge. I sit there in these palace-type settings wondering who exactly in this joint made my food. And even if there’s a chef making the rounds from table to table, I wonder whether he actually did anything during the service besides yell at a few underlings, sample the night’s amuse-bouche and have his picture taken with fawning tourists. Call me cynical, but whenever I dine in such impersonal restaurants, I sit there pining for a plate of my mom’s tarragon salmon enjoyed at her kitchen table. More and more when it comes to food, I need to feel THE LOVE. Because once you’ve felt THE LOVE, there’s no turning back.

What makes Montreal such a great restaurant city is the fact that we do feel the love in so many restaurants, places like Le St-Urbain, Pastaga, Joe Beef, La Salle à Manger, Mas Cuisine, Le Filet, Toqué!, Portus Calle, Madre, Jun-i, Mikado, Tavern on the Square and Osteria Venti among others. And what a lot of these restaurants have in common is a partial or fully open kitchen, where you can see the people behind your dinner. Add to that list the tiny new Café Sardine, a restaurant where I enjoyed a wonderful dinner while watching three chefs prepare every bite.

Among the three was Aaron Langille, a chef whose most recent Montreal experience includes Le Club Chasse et Pêche and Le Filet, who had a stage at that mecca of nouvelle-Scandinavian cuisine, Noma, in Copenhagen. After hearing this, I feared my plates might be replete with moss, edible flowers and Nordic-climed foraged ferns. Thankfully, that wasn’t quite the case, yet there were plenty of flavours on Langille’s plates to transport my taste buds to new horizons.

The other names in the Café Sardine equation are co-owners David Schmidt and Peter Popovic, who is also a partner at two other beloved Mile-End restaurants, Sparrow and Magpie. These gentlemen opened their 28-seat restaurant five months ago, after their friend, Pastaga chef Martin Juneau, told them the space of his former restaurant, Le Bouchon, was up for grabs.

Funnily enough, what drew me to Café Sardine in the first place was not the promise of cutting-edge cuisine, but homemade doughnuts. I first heard about the restaurant, which I last knew as Juneau’s wine bar, when inquiring about good doughnuts in Montreal, a city whose gourmet doughnut offerings leave plenty to be desired. Many sources pointed to Sardine, and when I finally set foot in this funky café, I did indeed find homemade doughnuts displayed on the small bar, kitty-corner to the equally petite open kitchen. There were only three varieties, but the choice of flavours – cinnamon/chocolate, ginger and lime/juniper berry – pointed to a kitchen with a pretty happening palate. The coffee is a big draw here as well. I bought a few doughnuts and a latte, devoured them on the sidewalk and vowed right there on the corner of Fairmount and The Main to return for dinner.

As casual as Café Sardine is in daylight, it’s pretty much as casual at night, save for the fact that the kitchen is turning out dishes you could find in many more upscale restaurants. Yet, unlike those upscale restaurants, reservations are not accepted here, so either come early, or plan on a walk around the neighbourhood while you wait for a text or call from management saying there’s a table with your name on it.

Right out of central casting, my demure-though-friendly waiter was actually wearing the Mile End hipster-uniform checkered shirt (and yes, he had a goatee). The wine list here is short but filled with well-priced private imports, most of which are either organic or bio-dynamic. Oh, and the background tunes are seriously cool. Natch.

Seated on a high banquette, sipping a delicious cucumber and gin cocktail, I perused the menu, which included all sorts of funky flavour-rich ingredients like watercress, anchovies, sage, marjoram, walnuts, bone marrow and beef cheeks. The dishes here are appetizer-sized and the idea is to order about two or three per diner, which we did along with a Côtes du Jura Pinot Noir, which worked beautifully with most everything we happily munched on. There’s a real sense of experimentation to these plates, which can miss but for the most part are a hit.

First on that list was a simple slice of crusty bread from the Guillaume bakery next door, which was smeared with fresh tomato. Nice. Following that came two dishes: a squash flan and a beet salad. Sliced into a rectangle and caramelized, the squash flan was velvety and sweet. A scattering of pickled shallots offset the sweetness and a few sprigs of marjoram added a bracing green taste. Full marks for flavour fireworks on that one.

The beet salad was all texture, with a mix of cooked beets and what tasted like radishes in a buttermilk dressing with more of that pungent marjoram. I liked it very much, though a bit more salt might have played down the sweetness of the beets.

A trout dish hit the table next, and with it came another big thumbs-up. Served with a sour-cream sauce, the delicate trout was set on a few caramelized fingerling potatoes with a tiny bit of super salty fish roe poised atop the trout. I liked the purity of flavours here, as well as the rich and melting trout flesh. Yum!

The highs continued with a dish made of sliced roasted lamb loin served with grilled onions, mint leaves, puréed walnuts and mustard seeds. The quality of the meat shone through with every bite, and the herbal accents in this dish, especially a few torn mint leaves, brightened all those earthy flavours.

I was a bit less taken, however, with a dish of beef cheeks paired with celery root and chive oil, only because it was too rich. Yet I had no problem with the light and luscious beef tartare flavoured with rose petals, or rich bone marrow served in a watercress salad with a slow-cooked duck egg. I love the peppery freshness of watercress, and paired here with the fatty marrow and lush egg, the dish came together thanks to a rather bracing vinaigrette. Superb.

Despite the scrumptiousness of Café Sardine’s doughnuts, desserts here could use a bit of work. The blue-cheese pannacotta was good yet a bit austere for my sweet tooth, and the lemon cake topped with lemon curd was dry and poorly executed. Think trifle sans the cream … not good.

Yet so much about Café Sardine’s food is good because there are just so many small flavour enhancers and details. And as much as I could go into details here about the herbs and greens and heirloom vegetables on my plate, they have changed often since I tasted them, as the menu is constantly evolving.

As a last little test of this restaurant’s charm, I took my two little boys for lunch. I ordered a bacon, beet and tomato sandwich, an apple sandwich with taleggio cheese, walnuts and watercress, and an odd sandwich consisting of a savoury doughnut filled with a slow- cooked egg and a sort of bacon hash. The doughnut was a bust with the kiddies, but the sandwiches scored, as these two are picky eaters. Why? Because everything just tasted so darn good.

Sipping on a cucumber soda, I asked the kids (sipping on their homemade ginger sodas) what they thought of the place.

“Cool, mom,” said my 7-year-old, “and I really like that,” he said, pointing to a mural depicting a large can of sardines on the east wall.

For more food and wine talk, tune in to Dinner Rush with Lesley Chesterman on

Saturdays from 4 to 5 p.m. on News Talk Radio CJAD 800.

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